


We'll Have a Whale of a Time

by QueerCrusader



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Bodily Fluids, Crack, First Kiss, M/M, THIS IS PURE FUCKING CRACK, Whales, but they belong to a whale, do not expect anything serious or accurate or realistic from this, stuck in a whale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueerCrusader/pseuds/QueerCrusader
Summary: Silver convinced Flint to go on a second shark date, with disastrous consequences.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver
Comments: 22
Kudos: 37
Collections: Black Sails Confinement Challenge





	We'll Have a Whale of a Time

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate title: _Let's Get That Moby Dick_. This was part of the [BS Confinement Challenge](https://medusinestories.tumblr.com/bsconfchallenge), and I had a lot of fun with it - though I'll admit, it was hard AF to write at times.

“Well, this is quite the predicament.”

Flint can feel his fingers twitching, like he’s subconsciously reaching for the trigger of a pistol he isn’t holding. “A predicament?” he grits. “A fucking _predicament_?” He turns, slightly slipping as he moves, to catch a glimpse in the dark of Silver looking slightly bemused. He wants to throttle him.

“Well,” Silver says with that hint of a shrug he so often utilises to lighten the tension in a conversation, “I admit, it’s not an ideal situation –”

“I have a war to fight,” Flint spits as he strides over. “I have a fucking war to fight, and instead I’m stuck with you inside of a fucking _whale_!”

He takes another step forward and sees Silver flinch. _Good._ “That is more than a predicament,” he growls. “That is the butt of the worst joke I have heard, that is a fucking _shitshow_.” He reaches out to grab Silver by the lapels, brimming with fury and itching to wipe that stupid smile off his face, but he slips, and with a horrible wet sound they both go down.

They wrestle for about thirty second before Flint realises Silver isn’t crying out with pain or effort. Instead, the little shit is laughing.

Flint stills his fist above Silver’s face. He’s straddling the man’s stomach, can feel the vibrations of his laughter shoot right up his spine, and he is reminded so much of the old Silver, the one who never lost a leg, who smiled so freely and often, that it aches. “Shut up,” he rumbles, but Silver only laughs harder.

“I’m sorry,” he hiccups, “I really am. Oh, but fuck me… Flint, we’re wrestling on a _whale tongue_.”

It’s so fucking bizarre. So incredibly weird and bizarre, and Flint can’t help himself. He lets out a chuckle, one that grows into full-blown laughter. With every move comes an unpleasant _slorp_ that has pushes them both further into hysterics, and it becomes impossible to get up. He’s not laughed this hard since… Well, a fucking while, that’s for sure.

He slides off Silver with another wet noise, the movement eased by the liquid they are coated in – he’s not sure if it is seawater or whale saliva – if there even is such a thing – and he really doesn’t care to know. Lying there on the spongy surface, he feels each laugh wash over him. “We really are,” he manages between breaths. “God, what in the _fuck_ …”

“You know, I take full responsibility,” Silver tells him, equally breathless.

“Good,” Flint retorts. “Because it is. This is your fault _entirely_.”

Silver had wanted them to hunt another shark together. _For old times’ sake_ , he’d said, _just the two of us_. Why the man would ever feel nostalgic to that moment is beyond Flint. They had been starving and delirious, not to mention the fact that it had ended with Flint furious and ready to kill Silver if he’d had the strength for it. But no, Silver was feeling _nostalgic_. Maybe he’d been even more delirious that first time than Flint had realised.

But they are friends now, and the ship did need to extend its provisions, so Flint decided to humour Silver and join him in the skiff. It had all gone relatively well, until a giant shadow had risen from the depths and swallowed them and the skiff whole.

For a brutal few minutes, they were shaken around, swirling and drowning in the confined space of the whale’s maw, but eventually the water drained, and the animal evened out. After they had taken a moment to catch their breath, the panic in James had subsided and had been replaced with sheer rage, which really is his default emotion when he goes into survival mode. But Silver had managed to dissipate his rage as skilfully as ever, and now he’s left feeling shaken and a little drained.

“I have to say, this is rather comfortable,” Silver says beside him, and he snorts.

“Don’t get any fucking ideas,” he mutters. “We are _not_ staying.”

“Alright,” Silver replies. “So you have a plan to get out?”

Flint turns his head to look at Silver in the dark. He can just make out a raised eyebrow and the glint in the man’s eyes. He groans.

“Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

“I’m sorry, I thought escaping less-than-fortunate situations was _your_ area of expertise.”

“And running headfirst into trouble used to be yours,” Silver points out. “Is this what we call growth, captain?”

“More like having a bad influence on each other.” Flint tries to push himself into a sitting position, but his hand slips out from under him, and with another _slorp_ he falls back onto the tongue. He tries a couple more times, but each attempt is futile. In the end, all he achieves is causing Silver to cry with laughter.

“God – fucking – _bastard fucking fish_!” he shouts out eventually, thrashing his limbs in frustration and bouncing his body up and down on the spongy surface. His fists come down with muffled _plap_ s, and Silver only laughs harder. He knows he’s acting like a child, but here, far out of the view of his crew, the absurdity of the situation seems to have unlocked something in him. He stills, then swipes his arm across the surface to send a wave of liquid in Silver’s direction. The man’s laughter quickly turns to cries of disgust, and Flint already feels infinitely better.

He tries engaging his core instead, hinging his torso up without the support of his limbs, and it helps. The next bit is trickier, but it’s worth it if it means he’ll regain some dignity.

“You know,” Silver says as he watches Flint struggle, “if I had known this is what I was signing up for, I would’ve left that page for what it was and just jumped overboard.”

“You’d risk it with the sharks instead?” Flint asks. He’s managed to get back to his feet now, but though the ground is steady beneath him, he is slipperier than he was before, and he doesn’t trust himself to remain upright. “Surely this is not _so_ bad.”

Silver’s nose wrinkles at that. “Are you kidding? I’ll never get this smell out of my hair.” The corner of Flint’s mouth twitches, and Silver points an accusing finger at him. “Not a word.”

Flint raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

They fall silent for a moment, taking in their surroundings.

“Okay, but really, any plans?”

Flint glares at him in the dark.

“Alright, alright, just checking. Do you think we could find our harpoons? That whale took down our entire skiff, surely he swallowed the harpoons too.”

“What do you wanna do, pick his teeth?” Flint asks. “Those harpoons weren’t exactly designed for anything bigger than a bull shark.”

“I just thought, if we irritate it, maybe it’ll open its mouth…”

Flint pinches the bridge of his nose. “Silver. It’s under water, God knows how deep.”

“Ah.”

“Besides, like I said, those harpoons are hardly going to do much. This whale is an absolute monster. We’d be tickling it, at most.”

They fall silent after that, and he can practically hear Silver’s mind churning.

“Okay, what is it? Spit it out.”

“What if we make it sneeze?”

Flint blanks. “I’m sorry,” he eventually manages when he feels like he’s gotten at least one braincell working, “you want to make a whale _sneeze_?”

“You’re the one who said we’d be tickling it,” Silver points out, and Flint honest-to-God feels his jaw drop.

“Silver – it’s a _whale_. I was being metaphorical. How the _fuck_ do you imagine we make a fish the size of the _Walrus_ sneeze!?”

“With the harpoons,” Silver replies a little bemusedly. He’s still sitting on the whale’s tongue, and Flint absentmindedly realises it must be far harder for him to get up, what with his leg. He makes no move to help the man up. “Look – how long does a whale go between breaths?”

Flint stares at him, baffled. “I don’t know,” he replies eventually, slowly, as if talking to a child. “I never sailed a whaling vessel before. It’s a fish. I don’t even know if they breathe.”

“Then what do they come up for? They’re living creatures, right? What’s that big spout about? Sounds like an exhale to me when it does the, you know –” he mimics an explosion above his head with his hands.

Flint just stares at him a little longer. “Okay,” he finally manages. “Let’s indulge this thought. Say whales do breathe. They are… _big_. They must have big lungs, right? So let’s compare their size to ours. We can hold our breaths for, what, a minute? Two minutes?”

“Speak for yourself, I’ve held mine for well over three,” Silver protests, and Flint rolls his eyes.

“Okay, but how much bigger are they than us? How many more minutes?”

Silver’s face scrunches up in the dark. “Are you asking me to perform arithmetic? I’ll have you know that I can only count when I am in dire need to do so.”

“This isn’t a dire need!?”

“Alright, when I feel like it, then. In any case, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Silver waves him away. “It can’t be more than an hour, surely, and we won’t run out of air that fast ourselves in here.” He frowns. “At least, I should hope not.”

“Okay, and when it goes up for air?”

“We tickle it with a harpoon and shoot out its blowhole.”

Flint brings his hand back up to pinch the bridge of his nose again, but he winces at the slickness of his fingers. He tries to wipe it off on his coat, but it is equally soaked. _Great_.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright.”

It is, he loathes to admit, the best idea they have, even if only because it is the only idea they have. The only thing he now has to figure out is how the fuck he’s going to last the next hour or so, trapped in a whale’s maw, without throttling the man beside him.

They end up preparing for Silver’s rudimentary plan to pass the time. Exploring the whale’s maw, they find splinters of the skiff, a knife covered in thick slick, two oars – both intact by some miracle – and three harpoons. Flint also realises that the whale in fact does not have teeth to pick, but instead walls of what looks like coarse hair lining its mouth, except the hair is about as hard and giving as wood.

In the dark, they are forced to explore mostly by touch. Silver goes around on hands and knees while Flint tries his best to stay on his feet, but there are times he has to concede and get down on his knees. It happens a couple of times where he and Silver reach for the same object in the dark and their hands end up brushing against each other. It should feel wet or slimy and not at all pleasant, but instead, each time it happens it sends a shock up Flint’s arm.

Silver fills the silence with incessant chatting, of course, and Flint mostly ignores him. He does it with a smile though, hidden from where Silver might catch a glimpse of him. Stuck in this situation, in a whale only God knows how far below the surface, there is a surreal sense to it all, a liminality where they are briefly allowed to forget that they are murderous pirates, hated men, fighting a war they cannot hope to win. Down here, they are boys in a dream.

And in this dream, Flint’s tempers come and go like clouds on the horizon, his humour youthful and simplistic. In this dream, Silver is the wide-eyed little shit he once was when he still had two legs, rather than one metal one coated in blood and brains. He is the boy who tells tall tales, stomping on wooden floorboards rather than bespectacled bastards as he draws the attention and wins hearts of the crew around him. He is shimmering and ever-moving in his wit, like quicksilver, and Flint finds himself wondering not for the first time if this is who he’s always been, if this Silver existed several lifetimes ago, before he ever saw the sea.

They take the oars from the skiff and gently lodge them in the back of the whale’s throat, right behind the uvula, careful not to cause damage to the animal. One is set behind them while the other is stuck in front of them. They can see the muscles in the wall contract around the intrusion, and it’s a little disconcerting, but the whale doesn’t seem bothered enough to open its maw and wash them down, thank God. The oars act as a sort of fence to brace themselves against, making sure they don’t go sliding down the animal’s throat at any point, in case it decides to swallow down the irritation they’re planning to cause with a gulp of seawater rather than sneezing them out, or equally that they’ll fly forward rather than upward when sneeze happens.

Once they’ve built their impromptu fence, they each grab a harpoon. With a grimace, Flint starts slicking his up. It is not his intention to damage the whale, and he hopes a layer of whatever fluid it is that surrounds them will be enough protection.

“You’re very diligent with that,” Silver remarks, and Flint looks up, his hand stilling.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Silver replies a little too fast. “I just – you know what, ignore me.”

“No,” Flint tells him as he carefully places the harpoon down, his eyes locked on Silver’s form in the dark. “I don’t think I can. Much as I would love to.”

“I, um,” Silver tries, and Flint feels a smirk slowly spreading on his face. He has a strong feeling he knows exactly what Silver is thinking, and while he refuses to mull over the implications, he will absolutely take a moment to revel in watching Silver squirm as he digs his own grave. He slowly starts moving his hand along the shaft of the harpoon again, taking extra care when coating the tip, all the while keeping eye contact with Silver across from him. “Diligent, you said?”

“Um, yeah,” Silver replies, his voice a little hoarse. “Very skilled.”

“You ever done this before?”

“Lube up a harpoon?”

“If you like.”

“Well,” Silver says, clearing his throat for a moment, “I certainly don’t seem as practiced as you.”

Flint raises an eyebrow. “Well, no time like the present to get some of that practice in, right?” he says with that same smirk. “You’ll never know when you need it.”

“Of course. Who knows when the next time will be that you find yourself in the mouth of a whale, preparing to launch itself out of its nostrils? We’ve got to be prepared.”

Flint tries, he tries so hard to keep a straight face in the hopes to turn this conversation back to torturing Silver with innuendos, but he just _can’t_. He breaks down, practically wheezing with laughter. Across from him, Silver looks relieved, his eyes shining with amusement in the dark.

When Flint manages to catch his breath again, he shakes his head with an exasperated sigh. He picks up the harpoon again and continues coating it, this time a little less seductively. Across from him, Silver does the same.

“Why did you want to do this, anyway?” Flint asks after a moment of silence, the timbre of his voice reverberating around the cavernous space.

“What, lube up harpoons? I assure you, captain, this is not how I intended to spend my afternoon.”

“No, you shit, I meant the shark hunt. What could possibly possess you to want to revisit that moment?”

Silver looks a little sheepish at that. “I don’t know,” he replies, not meeting Flint’s eyes.

“Bullshit.”

“Well, what do you want me to answer? I can’t…” He sighs before placing down his harpoon. It’s slicked up enough anyway. “I can’t pinpoint what it was about that moment. The relief of food? Or perhaps it was the relief of getting the truth out. The fact that even when you wanted and had every right to kill me, you didn’t.” He finally looks up to meet Flint’s eyes, and Flint feels his heart skip a beat for some inexplicable reason.

Well, that’s a lie – he knows perfectly well why he would feel this way. He just refuses to acknowledge it. Silver might have grown; become more selfless, more driven, and more mature. But he’s also just so… _Silver_. He’s a bastard, he’s dangerous, absolutely _ruins_ what is left of Flint’s already almost non-existent self-preservation instincts. He’s a fucking menace.

But he’s also kind of… _pretty_.

“You can’t deny that something happened between us,” Silver says, and Flint feels his hands clench around the shaft of the harpoon. “There was a moment of… _something_. Perhaps it was the isolation, the first time in a while that it was just the two of us. Our walls were down. We were both exposing ourselves. I suppose I wanted to relive that.”

“Isolation and vulnerability?” Flint retorts, his voice only a little hoarse. “Yes, that certainly sounds like a good time.”

“Listen, captain –” Silver starts, but he is silenced by a jolt in the floor beneath them. Flint’s eyes widen. He looks at the layer of water gently sloshing around them, and watches as the surface tilts ever so slightly.

“We’re rising to the surface,” he says.

They scramble to their feet, slipping a little as they have nothing to brace themselves against bar the equally slippery walls of the whale’s throat. They pick up their harpoons, and Flint suddenly regrets slicking up the shaft for comedic effect. The wood nearly slips through his fingers, and he swears loudly.

Once they are both in position, Silver searches out his gaze in the dark again.

“Listen,” he says, “before we’re launched back into reality again… Can we savour the _un_ reality of this?” His eyes spark with something, and again Flint’s heart flutters. It really needs to stop doing that. “Whatever happens down here between us may never see the light of day. It hardly can; this place doesn’t seem to be real, it doesn’t exist.”

Flint feels the corner of his mouth twitch. Silver’s words seem apt; down here, in the maw of a gigantic creature, they are John and James, and they are free.

“There was something between us,” Silver repeats. “I’d like to rediscover it.” He takes a small step forward, careful not to fall. Flint huffs.

“I don’t think this is what it was,” he says, not entirely sure if he’s lying or not. He lets Silver close the distance between them anyway.

“Perhaps,” Silver says, the corner of his mouth curling upward. “But you can’t fault me for trying.”

He brings up his free hand, and it’s wet and a little slick, but it’s warm where it cups around Flint’s neck. Silver seems to lord over him somehow, and he leans in to finally bridge the gap.

Silver’s lips are surprisingly soft. Flint’s eyes flutter closed, and he lets out a breath he didn’t realise he was holding. This feels incredibly bizarre; the wetness, the dark. But there is nothing unfamiliar about Silver. Kissing him, even like this, is like coming home. Flint suddenly feels a little like an idiot for trying to shove those feelings aside. He can permit himself this one joy.

Silver opens up against his lips then, but as Flint tries to deepen the kiss, both men recoil, spluttering. “Oh _God_ ,” Silver retches. “Okay, whale spit is real. That tastes _horrendous_.”

“I hate you,” Flint coughs. “This is definitely your fault.”

“You cannot blame me for having an accidental three-way make-out session with a monster fish,” Silver protests, trying to wipe the taste off his tongue but only coating it further.

“I can sure try.”

They manage to compose themselves, and just in time. Behind Silver, Flint can just see the whale’s throat shift.

“Get ready,” he warns Silver, clutching his harpoon. Silver nods, mirroring Flint’s stance. They both reach their harpoons out to tickle against the roof of the whale’s throat, gently prodding and scratching it.

The floor shakes beneath their feet, and Silver’s eyes widen with clear glee that his ridiculous plan actually seems to be working. “Again,” he urges. They repeat their movements, and this time, the whale’s tongue and throat spasm, throwing both men off their feet. There is a moment of shock where nothing happens. But then, the whale’s throat opens, and a rush of air comes through like a _whirlwind_.

The men bounce before being launched up, squeezed through a hole that is far too tight to hold two grown men, but somehow they are forced through in a few seconds of torturous claustrophobia, the slick of the whale’s saliva easing the way.

And suddenly, they’re free.

The light is almost blinding, and everything around Flint is blue, so vibrant blue. He furiously mills his limbs as he soars through the air, his stomach in his throat. He is not above admitting that he is absolutely yelling in sheer fear, Silver’s cries echoing beside him.

They both land in the ocean with a splash that makes Flint’s teeth rattle in his skull. It luckily also washes off some of the slime that was coating him, and he instantly feels refreshed – though the adrenaline racing in his veins might have something to do with that too.

Beside him, Silver surfaces with a shit-eating grin. “That was fucking _incredible_!” he whoops. Flint splashes water at him and watches gleefully as it drips from his beard.

“We are _not_ doing that again,” he tells him.

“Are you sure, captain? I’m sure I can arrange something –”

“ _No more fucking shark fishing!_ ”

“You’re no fun at all.”

They manage to float around for about ten minutes before the _Walrus_ picks them up and hoists them out of the water. DeGroot looks beyond disgusted at the state of them, but it seems nothing can deter Silver’s good mood. Flint can’t blame him; he can still feel a ghost of the man’s lips against his own.

Perhaps, when they’re cleaned up, they’re willing to try again – and this time, it’ll be an exchange of fluids between just the two of them.

Flint honestly can’t wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Are whales fish? Nope, they're mammals. Do 18th century pirates know that? Probably not. Do whales even have spit? Please don't ask me to google that. Anyway, please leave a comment or come yell at me about gay pirates on [tumblr](https://queer-crusader.tumblr.com/)


End file.
